Miss Marryellen
by The Sea Girl
Summary: I'm just your normal kind of girl, at least, until the old lady I visit regularly dies and I "inherit" her things, that's when things get weird.


To start off, this isn't a love story. I'm a nineteen year old girl, I'm fairly normal except I spend most afternoons at the senior center with an old woman called Miss Marryellen. No one knows her full name or much about her past but she likes telling me stories from her imagination. She's ninety-six I think and she speaks with an old accent. She tells me all the time that her long silver hair used to be blond and beautiful, I always tell her that it still is beautiful, of course.

I went in that day as usual and when Miss Marryellen saw me she smiled and whispered in her soft, sweet voice, "Come here child, let me see you. Ah, yes, there we are. You are so beautiful, just like I was when I was your age."

She looked at me with her piercing, old, grey eyes, studying me as I sat next to her, "You have never known real love, true love, have you?"

I blushed, "Well, I do have a boyfriend."

She smiled faintly and shook her head, "Does he make you happy? Always happy." Her eyes drifted off. I waited for her to return to the present and when she smiled at me I finally looked down. "Does he make you happy?" she asked again.

I tried to force a smile but her grey eyes made me want to tell her the truth. "Well, we go out every now and then but never anywhere nice, only to fast food places. But most of the time we stay in and he plays a lot of video games."

"Does he tell you he loves you? Does he say you are beautiful?"

"I laughed because it all sounded so ridiculous, "No."

"Does he give you flowers and play with your pretty hair? Does he make you laugh even when you want to be mad at him? Does he make your heart flutter just by smiling at you? That is real, true love." She sighed and I realized just how weak she was. "I had that kind of love once," she whispered, "And now it is time for me to join him. You don't know your history, Nina, you don't know who you are. Learn that and they will find you."

She did that, often talking nonsense, I mean, it all had a meaning but I didn't understand any of it. I knew that she once had a love but she never told me his name, only that he had gone to some place called Elysium a long time ago, I didn't even know there was a place called that. She talked about when she would return to him all the time but now she made it sound like she was going to get up and go right then. She took a shaky breath and I held her hand, it seemed to be colder than usual. Miss Marryellen seemed to have been lost in the past again so I pulled out my minicomputer and did a searched on Elysium but the internet didn't bring anything up, maybe she had just made it up. But her love was real, I knew that for sure.

Then Miss Marryellen laughed, it was incredibly weak and it made my chest hurt just to hear it. "Oh, you won't find it online. It was erased from that many years ago, check a book instead, a true Greek would know what it is." A few minutes of silence stretched between us as I tried to make sense of that. She smiled again, only it wasn't at me, "Yes, I will go now." Her eyes fell on me, "Take care Nina, and learn who you are."

"But you can't say goodbye yet, it's not time for me to leave yet," I told her. Suddenly she seemed to look much younger than she was and with one more breath she squeezed my hand and lay still. Tears sprang to my eyes, "Miss Marryellen?" There was no pulse in her wrist. I sat there for a few minutes, dazed before I stood called for a nurse. No one seemed surprised but everyone was sad and after she was moved the nurse in charge of taking care of Miss Marryellen's belongings came up to me.

"I think you should go through her things, you were the only one who was close to her. As far as we know she doesn't have any other family."

"Thank you," I said trying to hold back tears.

"She'll be in a better place Nina, she's been ready for this for a long time." I nodded and she signed the belongings over to me.

I went back into the room and looked around then pulled put my phone and called my boyfriend. "Yeah," He said after the third ring.

"Hey, Miss Marryellen died."

I knew he wouldn't care but it still made me angry when he said boardly, "Oh, cool."

"Mark!" I could hear a game playing in the background and from the noise at least two other people where there playing with him. "You aren't even listening to me. Oh, by the way, I'm pregnant."

"Nice, wait, what?"

"Oh, so you can listen."

"Don't matter, it's not mine."

I rolled my eyes, "I'm not actually pregnant dim wit, but I am breaking up with you, so goodbye." I hung up then sent him an email saying the same thing, he would get it sooner or later. Then I went back to Miss Marryellen's room to gather her things. There wasn't much there but I found an old notebook on the bedside table. It looked like a journal maybe but when I opened it and started reading I thought there was no way that those things had really happened. I shook my head and closed the book, then I looked under the bed where I knew she kept a box of things, I had never seen what was in it but as I pulled it out all I saw was a bunch more books like the one on the table. "What the..."

I started going through them, they were labeled by year. In the box was a smaller box full of pictures of different people but only two people kept showing up, often kissing or holding each other. One was a beautiful blond girl that had to be Miss Marryellen, and the boy she was had shaggy black hair, sea green eyes, and they both often had on orange t-shirts that said 'Camp Half-Blood'. I wondered if it had been a joke between the group of friends in all the pictures. There were even pictures of babies and as I flipped through those I realized that those children had been Miss Marryellen and the black haired guys, there were three kids and I watched them grow up through the pictures. I didn't know how but I just kept pulling pictures out of the box, way more than I thought could possibly fit in it, it must have been an illusion.

Eventually I gave up trying to pull all of the pictures out and so I started putting the stacks back in even though it already looked full to the brim. I packed everything back to my house and through the next few days I sat and read Miss Marryellen's stories. They were so detailed that I almost thought they were true, but monsters, Gods, Titans, yeah those didn't exist so they had to be just stories, things Marryellen had been working on all her life since she was little. Many times I had to skim past some mushy parts that seemed as if they had come from her real experiences. With some editing this would be good material for publishing but I wasn't going to do that because as I read through the last few books, after Percy's death (I guess that's what Elysium was, some heaven for Demi-Gods in her story's), she described him and all of the other characters exactly like the people in the pictures, anyway, as I read the last books a slow dawning came upon me, this girl that Marryellen had written in, her story, was MY story.

Could it be? Was this really real? That's when it all came clear, Everything in my life, the death of my parents, all the crazy things that happened to me, I wasn't like the people in the books but I knew by the end that Miss Marryellen was actually a girl named Annabeth Chase and after seventy years of bad fortune for her family, I, Nina Jackson, was her last known descendant, her Great-great Granddaughter or something like that. And according to M-Annabeth, one of her son's married another Demi-God and they had a couple kids, and one was my grandfather, who had a child with a Goddess: Dad, who married another Demi-God and had me.

What would they call someone like me with as crazy of a family tree as that? As far as I knew I had no powers and I wasn't as smart as an Athena child, I couldn't control water and as for the three other Gods in my line, I wasn't as beautiful and an Aphrodite kid, I wasn't good with flowers like a Demeter kid, and I couldn't tell prophesy's, make a poem, or shoot a bow like Apollo. I was just a normal person as far as I knew.

But if the stories where true then there would be one person who could tell me, well, not a person exactly. So I bought a ticket to New York on the earliest flight and a few hours later I was driving along Long Island toward the spot Camp Half-Blood was supposed to be. I had the Magic box of Annabeth's books and photos in the front passenger seat of the rental car. I didn't want to take a cab because I didn't know if I would have a way back if the cab left and I found out it was all just a fairytale. I followed the directions exactly and stopped on the side of the road right where Annabeth had said to. I saw a hill with a very tall pine tree on top with a golden thing in it that looked like a plastic bag. I stared at it and soon the bag blurred and when it came clear I saw what it really was.

So it was true after all, this was Half-Blood hill, that was Thalia's tree, that was the golden fleece, and that part of the hill was really a dragon. I about passed out but I took a deep breath and opened the car door. I walked up the hill warily, maybe I was imagining it, maybe I was just seeing what the books had described. At the top of the hill I tried to stay as far away from the Dragon as possible but as soon as I crossed the crest of the hill and passed through a thick wall of air, which only pushed against me slightly, the creature opened his eyes with a growl and raised his head to look at me. I stood still, somehow perfectly calm even when he sniffed me, his razor sharp teeth inches from me.

He roared at the sky and looked down the hill into a valley where I saw many cabins, a big blue house, a river, a lake and a massive forest. There were a bunch of other buildings there too and together the place was huge. Then I noticed that there were people moving about, most of them had stopped at the sound of the Dragon's roar and a few were toward me, some of those few wearing Greek armor just as I had seen In Annabeth's pictures.

I waited for them to come to me and as I watched them I noticed a form come out of the big Blue house, it looked like a man riding a horse then I blinked and it was a white centaur. I grinned, that had to be Chiron. Everything was real, that was all I cared about. This was amazing. The campers surrounded me, checking me out curiously. When Chiron arrived everyone moved aside for him.

"Hello, I am Chiron, who are you?" he asked.

"My name is Nina," I said confidently, "Nina Jackson."

Chiron looked taken aback and the crowd around me burst into chaos, everyone talking to their neighbors, "Jackson," "Percy," "Annabeth," I heard. "The lost line.

"Enough," Chiron called, stomping his hoof on the ground and everyone quieted. "You have crossed into the borders of Camp Half-Blood, do you know who your Godly parent is Nina Jackson?"

Suddenly I felt conscious of all the eyes on me, "I don't have a Godly parent. My mom was the daughter of a mortal and the God Apollo, my dad was the son of the goddess Persephone and his dad was the son of a daughter of Aphrodite and the son of Percy and Annabeth Jackson. So, in other words, I have two godly grandparents a godly great-great grandparent, and I am the great-great granddaughter of Percy and Annabeth. Um," I stopped at the looks on their faces and pull out the piece of paper that I had written my family tree on and handed it to Chiron.

He looked it over and nodded, "You have a noble family." His eyes grew sad, "But by your arrival here I am to assume that it means my dear Annabeth has finally passed on to Elysium."

I nodded, "I knew her for the last few years but I never knew who she really was until after and I got all of her journals. I read them all, I brought them with me, they are in the car."

"I'll have Argus retrieve your things and take the car back, you won't be needing it anymore," the centaur said.

I couldn't believe it, I had made it back to the home of my ancestors and weather I had any powers or abilities, these people were accepting me like I was one of their own.

**If you liked or disliked this please let me know why, :-)**


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